After Sanctuary, before Jiang's Star (at least I don't remember the second one). I have just discovered Howtizer MK III and am thrilled about the ease with which I can kick some Sung ass BTW, it's very nice how the game is (uptill now) intuitive and relatively easy, while at the same time being challenging and fun.

Edit:

As far as the system and how far I am are concerned, in this Numenorian System I found the first CSC ship, Arctica.

Er, if you are taking about the silly 5 point typeface that I used, then sorry. But if not, here's an explanation

Numerianus can appear as a name for the Level 6 system "C8". There is a 25% chance that system C8 will be named Numerianus. And every game will have a system C8. Here's an excrept from Transcendence.xml

Here, we can see that C8A will always lead to C9. This effectively makes C8A RNG based system --- there's a 50% chance you will get it and there is a 50% chance that you won't. This is what I meant by an "optional system". I'll draw a small map of the remaining systems.
C8 C8A C9 A1 A2 EC A3 A3A PJ A5 A6 A7 G1 G2